Paul Kingsnorth

You have these expertise.

So one of my friends is Paul Kingsnorth, who would not even go to the ARC conference and was very scornful of Jordan Peterson and his whole project and so on.

And of course, we had the great Wendell Berry died recently and he didn't even have a computer.

But...

But...

And I think it's something we talked about in the podcast before is Paul Kingsnorth's book, Against the Machine.

And in there, he really drills down to this fact that, you know, if you have a really strong culture, that would be passed on from the elders.

And if you look at really strong cultures, First Nation cultures...

Name will return eventually.

Kingsnorth, is it? Kingsnorth, Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul Kingsnorth.

It's really fascinating when you try and just... to limit the elite worldview down into, I don't know, a tweet or a paragraph or something like that.

Because what it ultimately seems to be is they want to vanish from the earth.

Absolutely.

And people like Paul Kingsnorth, who's writing a book on the wild saints, they're tapping into this greatly, and Martin Shaw and others.

I think we have to honour the truth of who they were, the historical truth, and we have to have kind of scripture at the heart and Christ at the heart as these saints would have wanted it.

But I think we can sort of take people's interest in this early period and the kind of connection with the land and with animals and so on, which really was their And connect it, lead people along and show them that it was really Christ was the key that makes sense of this whole way of life.

Welcome to Spirit Gym.

What if the reason you can't stick to your health goals has nothing to do with your willpower? Paul's guest today, Eugene Trufkin, argues that in America, being overweight, exhausted, anxious, and on a handful of prescriptions has quietly become normal.

so normal that most people no longer notice.

He explains why so many people struggle with their health, not because they lack information, but because their lives are built around work instead of well-being.

So Eugene, welcome.

It's lovely to have you back.

No, thanks, Paul.

It's good to see you.

And ultimately throughout the witness of scripture, the church has come to see Jesus Christ as our God-given wisdom.

Paul writes in Corinthians that Christ is the wisdom of God.

And that's why I wanted to begin today with that powerful poem.

The poem's called O Sapientia, which is Latin for wisdom.

War is as old as we are.

However, I do take the view that we are living in a particularly unusual time.

Listen to this from Paul Kingsnorth.

Our age, I think, is unique.

So these are all fine culprits to point to.

But a question worth asking is, what if all of these things, the ideologies responsible for rationalizing and promoting and furthering decline, and the people carrying out, the people implementing those ideologies, What if there is something upstream from all of that? What if these are just simply manifestations of a deeper rot, of some kind of deeper and bigger and ultimately more insidious process or problem? Such is the basis of a book written in 2025 by Paul Kingsnorth titled Against the Machine on the Unmaking of Humanity.

Now, Kingsnorth is kind of an interesting guy.

Going into this book, I didn't really know too much about him.

It was kind of a different type of leftism back then.

And I'm not saying it's good, just so we're We're clear.

But over time, Paul Kingsnorth, he ended up converting to Orthodox Christianity, having a family, moving out of the city, right, living kind of a semi-trad homestead lifestyle.

He's contributed to First Things.